


Giving up the gun

by bannanachan



Category: Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-22 22:38:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8303836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bannanachan/pseuds/bannanachan
Summary: Eleanor let them all go with a smile on her face without a grudge in her heart, and Kade tried to imagine having her patience. Maybe it would come as he aged. Maybe he was too much of a boy. Maybe patience was harder to come by when people kept shutting the door in your face instead of behind your back.





	

He’s not sorry when Nancy goes, but he’s jealous, and knowing that she’s happy doesn’t make it less lonely. Christopher still comes up to the attic and makes cocoa, and it’s worse than what Jack made but better than what he can make. He helps his classmates swap clothing and is tolerated more than he is liked.

The students are more restless than ever these days. Jack and Jill and then Nancy. Albeit the unusual circumstances, three girls had found their doors within six months. Hope seemed more worthwhile than before, and staying here felt more dangerous. Already a few students had either gone back home or transferred campuses, some of them even going international. Eleanor let them all go with a smile on her face without a grudge in her heart, and Kade tried to imagine having her patience. Maybe it would come as he aged. Maybe he was too much of a boy. Maybe patience was harder to come by when people kept shutting the door in your face instead of behind your back.

Slowly, new students replace old ones. Christopher leaves, and they keep in touch, but only barely. One day, Eleanor introduces him as a teacher, and even though she didn’t ask if it was okay first, and didn’t mean to do it until she had done it, they both accept it as soon as it’s said. He keeps up with research. He goes through Lundy’s notes two dozen times in a year, making new annotations and connecting different dots each time. He takes over orienting new students and he asks them more questions than he should, Eleanor says. Eleanor says everyone needs to reveal things in their own time, and she’s probably right, but every new world is a clue and a point on the map spread over an entire attic wall.

He watches the news light up with conversations about transgender rights and he thinks about calling his parents, but he doesn’t. He welcomes a student who went to a world that saw her as a girl before she did, and she cries into the sleeve of a dress that used to be his when she talks to the other kids about it. And he thinks about calling his parents, but he doesn’t. Eleanor comes to the attic that night and she lets him cry and strokes his back, and she understands what he means when he says he wants to go home.

He worries about her for a long time, because her body is fading so much faster than her mind these days. He doesn’t think he could bury her if it came to that. Realistically, he couldn’t even touch the body. But who else could do it? It keeps him up at night, until she starts forgetting where she put things, and then the students’ names. The day she forgets his name, they both laugh through their tears, and it’s beautiful and awful and bittersweet. When finally, she doesn’t know he’s her nephew, he decides it’s time, and he leads her to the door with a parade of girls in tow and hugs her one last time before she walks through. The next moment, the door is gone. He takes that to be a good sign, and doesn’t contemplate the alternative.

He tells the cops that she wandered off into the forest in the night, and when they can’t find her body, he inherits the whole estate. Eleanor kept her papers in perfect order, so it’s not hard, not as hard as he thought it would be to take over property from a woman born in the 1800s. He gets offers to buy immediately, of course, and of course, he turns them down. Some far-flung neighbors and several developers use some words about him that he could probably start a civil rights lawsuit over if he wanted to, and for some reason that’s refreshing. It makes it easy to say no.

Everything’s easy, actually. It’s been a while now, so none of the students now knew him as a student from back then. It’s easy to be headmaster, easy to command respect, easy to inherit the land, easy to stand his ground here. And for the first few weeks, he thinks he might be able to do this. This is his future, forever. The future he’s been expecting for years now has finally come. This is it. This is who he is, and who he’s going to be, until he dies.

But he can’t do it.

Every night, after lessons and dinner, he retreats back to the attic, and he stares at the wall. The wall, and the adjacent walls, and the whiteboards and chalkboards and notepads that he’s sprawled all over this attic space with different theories, different notes, different connections. Worlds of logic and nonsense and virtue and wickedness and vitas and mortis and somewhere in the web, somewhere he can barely even locate, Prism. Home. His real home. The home he’s said he hates for ten years. But he doesn’t.

And it’s harder every day to pretend, when students are going missing, going home more and more often, and less and less are showing up each month, less and less coming back at all. He’s getting old, and he’s passing better, which is sometimes nice but sometimes hurts: a casual, cutting reminder by way of his mirror. You’re not her any more. You can never go back. He is so apart from everything these children are, and being around them just makes it worse. He tries not to let it show, because he doesn’t want them to get the wrong impression, to think that he doesn’t love them, or believe in this, or think that he resents them. He still doesn’t resent anyone; he won’t let his jealousy bleed. But he’s dying here, and he doesn’t know what to do.

There are still a few students. He does his job. He has to.

And then one day, he gets a letter from a pair of frightened parents whose daughter insists that when she disappeared for a week, she was in a place called Prism.

He makes her tell him everything. It’s the first instance that he knows of, or that any of the other teachers know of, where two unrelated people have gone to the same world. It’s weird looking at her, talking to her. They look nothing alike, but it’s still like looking in a mirror. She pauses at the same places he would, frowns just the same way. Uses the same words that he would to explain what happened, how she won the war that had been waging for a hundred thousand years and then wasn’t needed any more. She tells him what her door looked like and where she found it and she tells him that she heard his name while she was there. The goblins were still waiting for him to claim their throne. She tells him it’s an honor, and he just tells her “Thanks.”

He does not sleep that night. There are too many implications to consider, to many notes to review. He is up until dawn creeps through the window and he manages to stay up for the remainder of the next day without raising too many students’ suspicion. He usually looks tired anyway.

He doesn’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. But at least now the decision’s been made. Now that he knows, he doesn’t have a choice. He can’t stay here.

If Prism wasn’t taking him back, he was taking back Prism.

The guilt hits late, after he’s already decided, after he’s started plotting. It’s when he realizes he’s going to have to give the land away to someone, and it hits him that he’s really leaving this, leaving Eleanor’s home, leaving the kids. It’s almost enough to change his mind, but then he thinks of what she would do, and it gets a little easier.

He lets the students know at dinner once he’s decided that he’s ready to try, starting the conversation with an antique spoon tapped on a ceramic mug. They quiet down, but only about half of them look over.

“So, I think I know a way to open a door.” He says. That catches their attention pretty quick. “I don’t know if it’s gonna work, and if it does – here’s the thing, I don’t know where it’s gonna go. If I’m right, it could be anywhere. It won’t just send you home. It might send you to the opposite side of the map, but – I also think there might be a way to move around, once you’re in there. To get home. It would stay open until someone closed it on purpose, but it won’t work two ways. You couldn’t get back to this side after going through. I haven’t proved any of this yet, because I can’t. But I’m going. And if I’m right, and it stays open, you can follow me. You don’t have to, this place will stay open. I already got some teachers at the other schools to agree to take it over. And just so you know, they don’t agree with what I’m doing. Um, you might wanna listen to them, because this is probably crazy. But I’m gonna try it tomorrow morning, and if I can open that door, I’m leaving through it. I’m sorry. I love you. It’s nothing against any of you. And really, you probably shouldn’t follow me, because I got no proof of any of this, but I’m gonna be gone. I won’t be in charge of what you should and shouldn’t do any more. And I didn’t think it would be right not to tell you. It’ll be where Eleanor’s door was – any of you don’t know where that is, just ask around. At 8. I’ll see you then, some of you, and if I don’t see you – good luck anyway.” 

That’s what he leaves them with. It’s nothing like it should be, not dramatic enough, not clear enough. It’s probably not responsible, but he won’t lie. They’re so young, and he would never forgive himself if he’d let them get old without knowing their options.

Upstairs in the attic, he takes out his old armor. It came over with him, and he’s kept it in a box buried under everything else. Nothing fits, of course, but there’s a sword. His hands shake when he picks it up and his memories echo, being thirteen, holding it in two hands because it was half his height, and his hands shook then too. Now it’s more like a shortsword than a broadsword, but he doesn’t remember how to use either of those things, to be honest. If he’s going back, even if the war is over, he knows he’ll have to fight, and when he thinks about that it’s not just his hands that shake. One last time, he thinks about turning back. Staying here, growing old, making a family, maybe making another effort with his parents if they’re still out there. Honoring Eleanor. Staying safe.

At 8 AM the next morning, Kade is standing where Eleanor’s door used to be, armed with a binder and a sword and a windbreaker. About half his students watch from behind him as he fusses around with machines and ritual objects arrayed on the ground. He flips a switch, takes a step back, says a word, and something comes to life. Something six feet tall and three feet wide and paneled in oak with no frame, no peek hole or window – no handle. He steps forward and shoves it, just a little, and it swings inwards. He peeks through the crack and doesn’t see anything, looks at the other side of the door, but there’s no handle there either, not even any paneling, not a grip to be had. He tries pulling it back towards him, but it’s clear immediately – the door only goes one way.

Which is fine. Once he’s gone, he’s not coming back.

He looks over his shoulder at the kids. A few of them are crying, but all of them are smiling. The girl who went to Prism is standing just behind him, all 4’8” of her, looking up at him with an expression that he thinks might be a challenge.

He laughs, turns back around, and goes through.

**Author's Note:**

> Was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not literally the first fic to be posted for this fandom. Maybe [blooper-boy](blooper-boy.tumblr.com) won't be literally the only person ever to read it! Thanks to her for beta'ing. It was supposed to be a drabble but it... got long.
> 
> Title is from "Giving up the Gun" by Vampire Weekend.


End file.
